CHESS QIZI 棋子

Performance at the opening of my exhibition on October the 13th at the Chinese European Art Center, Xiamen. The film with subtitles is by Wei Na. Zhang Fang wrote a thorough and philosophical text "About CHESS QIZI". Here a fragment:"The performance is a cooperation of Pedro and a young dancer, Wang Yunke, which lasted for half an hour and consisted of three parts: at begining, Pedro dumped a bag of rice on Wang Yunke who was lying on the floor and holding a rabbit doll. This scene insinuated the #MeToo movement in mainland China with the same pronunciation of “rice and rabbit” v.s. “metoo” in Chinese. When the #MeToo movement spread its range to China, many social celebrities appeared on the name list of criminals of sexual assault or harassment. Officials immediately censored all the public reports on internet to protect them. Pedro tried to avoid supervision in this way. Then, Wang Yunke unfolded two hand scrolls of Pedro and read the texts on them. These two scrolls are about Qingwen and You Sanjie in " the Dream of Red Chamber", who stand out in the renown novel as female characters. They are dare to challenge the unreasonable rules imposed by patriarchy society on women. The second part is inspired by Lolita. Wang Yunke had a solo dance with the music from the film; Pedro also performed a hiphop after Wang Yunke's dance. He sang and danced a song of Geto Boys, called "Gangster of Love". This song is a typical macho song. He wants to oppose the macho viewpoints with the vulnerable feminist position in mainland China. The last part of the show comes from a true story of a girl friend of Pedro. She told him of her experience of being assaulted by her high school teacher on Wechat. Pedro and Wang Yunke adapted the story a little bit. The female student in the story was no longer innocent. When the teacher tried to make physical contact, the girl just avoided instead of escaping, with an ambiguous attitude, such as taking off the shoes to show her feet to the teacher. This led the teacher to make a further move. Finally, the teacher offered to help her application to study abroad. The show ended at the high time when the teacher suggested sexual favors in return: would her take this offer or push him away and keep her innocence? The three parts of the performance corresponded to the three paintings that Pedro recently created and hung on the wall: figuring Wang Yunke as model, Pedro painted her in the scene of Lolita, and in school uniform. The other one was Pedro's self-portrait, but he turned himself into a sultry machismo."